Sad that the technical boffin who wrote the piece didn’t really emphasise the advantages of FM over AM.
Instead of spruiking greater audio fidelity and resistance to interference, it was all about putting extra ABC stations on the air in underserved areas.
Interesting that they put an FM antenna on top of the ABV tower when it was built. I’m guessing it may never have been used. They probably just stuck with Jolimont until the plug was pulled.
But to be fair, a couple of points
FM receivers weren’t as common back then. A lot of cars only had AM radio, no FM.
The noise/IF issue on AM wasn’t nearly as bad back then as it is now.
To be even fairer, a couple more points.
In 1957 (when the article was written) no radios in Australia would’ve had FM, it didn’t exist in Australia then, & wasn’t that widely used anywhere else in the world.
For the general public to listen to these FM transmissions they would’ve had to import an FM receiver from the USA, which back then wasn’t a done thing, or likely even possible for an individual to do.
FM radios or integrated AM/FM radios didn’t start to appear until the late 1970’s after a few community stations started on FM, but even then they were few & far between, around 1980 combined AM/FM radios started to become more common, but cars didn’t start getting FM radios until about 1982-83, up until then it was AM radio only & mostly AM mono with 1 speaker mounted somewhere in the dash.
From '84 onwards AM/FM in cars was starting to get quite common, some car models made from late '84 (I think) started coming out with AM Stereo/FM Stereo radios in them too, (with the introduction of AM Stereo in March '85).
Noise & IF issues on AM didn’t really exist back in 1957, or even up until the late "80’s early '90’s. Thunderstorms would’ve been the only source of AM noise/IF back then, the authorities (ACMA, FCC, OFCOM) had plenty of field staff back then & jumped on any sort of interference generating thing fast. Don’t forget the Vision carrier of PAL Analogue TV was AM & would suffer the same interference/noise as AM radio (TV would get “static” lines through the picture), anything generating AM interference was a serious issue back then, unlike now where no one gives a stuff & you’ve got cheap switch mode power supplies & LED’s emanating so much noise it’s not funny & all this has raised the noise floor significantly & now it doesn’t take much to interfere with AM.
I don’t think it was that FM receivers weren’t common, they literally didn’t exist. Likewise, even a radio in a car wasn’t a given but would have only been AM. I don’t think FM radios were routinely put in cars until well into the 1980s?
I managed to get an AM/FM clock radio to hear the start of transmission of 4ZZZ in Brisbane in December 1975. That was about all that was available even then.
4ZZZ back then went to air from a turnstile antenna on top of the Schonel Theatre at St Lucia with a couple of hundred watts from an old Elit Channel 5A TV translator as the PA amplifier. The exciter and MPX generator were home-brewed by an engineer named Ross Danecker. Off the shelf FM gear was not an option there due to cost back then. Eventually they got up to Mt Coot-tha in a shared hut with 4MBS and ZZZ’s main transmitter was a 3Kw Sintronic. Not sure what they use now, but the site has been redeveloped as ‘Broadcast Park’ and all Brisbane’s community FM is in there.
Yep, around 1983-85 which is when they pretty quickly started becoming common due to the increasing popularity of new stations like 2MMM, 3EON etc.
Yes the signal from St Lucia was pretty weak. The switch to Mt Coot-tha made a big difference.
This compaile contains their first broadcast from there @ 16:26. They were still at 105.7 MHz at the time. Following that is their switch to 102.1 and an ERP of 4kW.
Earlier @ 1:09 is their opening broadcast as 4ZZ FM - direct from my clock radio.
That air check is a great bit of history - when 4ZZZ and 4MBS went in the same hut on Mt Coot-tha they had seperate antennas on the same tower(ie the site did not have a combiner). While it was in that configuration they both had to turn their powers down due to 3rd order intermods which put spurious carriers right across the FM band. In this day and age you would never be allowed to run a site like that but back then no commercials were on FM and ZZZ and MBS were the only stations on the band anyway. A FM combiner would have been big $$$ and only available from the USA.
Also back then most cars didn’t have a radio at all, especially Australian made cars. My parents installed an aftermarket radio in a Falcon in the late 70’s. And it was an Am-Fm push button one - AWA IIRC.
I understand all of those points of course. But if proper FM broadcasting had begun, FM radios would soon follow. Don’t forget that the BBC began a big rollout of FM from around 1957. And the radio manufacturers soon jumped on that. It wasn’t just a USA thing. And we did have a lot of radios imported from the USA from the likes of Stromberg-Carlson (spelling?) and others.
Further, there was a lot of interference around on AM in those days. Just different from what we have today. From unsupressed or badly supressed car ignitions, analog TV sets that were poorly manufactured, and if you lived in some cities, trams!
The writer of the article just didn’t make a good case for introducing FM. That’s all I was saying!
Very correct - the old valve B&W TV’s often used a 6CM5 tube for their 15Khz line output - that tube was popular in home-brew ham transmitters of that era, it was so good at producing RF. Those TV’s did limit the DX you could pick up on AM and SW back then, although they were nowhere as bad as switch mode PSU’s or PV inverters of today
Are there any studios in the new building? Just in case 10News ever returned to being a local product. Or is it now just a sales office?
Hutt Street was just a newsroom with standing presentation and a green screen for sport and weather until news returned to Adelaide in 2011.
The old Adelaide studio was retro-fitted into the space they already had. Nothing stopping them from doing it again, provided there’s room.
I think that was rather hastily thrown together after the brand relaunch but, yes, does look rather odd. The rest of the reception space is now gutted, including the TVs - that slightly wrong logo was the only thing left.
That building still looks pretty new.
I seem to remember it was purpose built (or at least fitted out) for Ten when they moved from Strangeways Tce so it would be about 15 years old, same length of time 10 have been there. Suppose they don’t need as much space and/or don’t want to pay for the premium location these days.
I guess a tin shed in Gawler was unavailable?
